I have the distinct pleasure at this year’s SCAA of accompanying a small group of CRS staff and partners from the coffeelands who have never been to the event before. When I sat down in advance of the event to summarize for them just who participates and everything that happens during the three days of this hyper-caffeinated affair, I realized just what a circus SCAA really is! That’s why we asked our CAFE Livelihoods partner Cooperative Coffees to help us create a farmer’s guide to SCAA.
Coop Coffees kindly obliged, and in a matter of hours generated the first draft of this guide to the SCAA for smallholder farmers, which we distributed prior to the event. It is accessible, actionable and insightful, and answers (in Spanish) everything farmers always wanted to know about SCAA, but didn’t know who to ask.
This is just the first of dozens of simple, topical “modules” that Cooperative Coffees is developing for smallholder farmers as part of our work together in the coffeelands. The plan is to consolidate all this wisdom into an open-source resource for coffee farmers and their allies and invite others to contribute from their own experience and expertise. For lack of a better name — and creative inspiration — we have just been calling it “The Manual.”
More here on The Manual as it evolves.